When an Off-the-Ball Kick Only Earns a Yellow: V-League Holds Emergency Talks Amid a Violent Run of Fixtures

The ball had already travelled to the other side of the pitch. On the stands at Dong Nai stadium on the afternoon of September 20, nobody turned their head in time to follow it. In the television frame, Nguyen Dinh Bac had just released the ball to a teammate when he was pulled back from behind. Not by a hand. By a set of studs. Huynh Tan Sinh came in twice. The first time into his left calf. The second time into his right shin, by which point the Cong An Ha Noi (CAHN) striker had no ball left to protect. Dinh Bac went down and looked at the referee. Referee Le Vu Linh produced a yellow card. A yellow card for an act that contained no ball at all.

In the same match there was another moment: Dong Nai full-back Le Van Son threw an elbow at Dinh Bac. The same name, the same half. Two different acts, two attacks on the same player.

When the stands fall silent, the ball begins to tell stories. This time the story is an old one, retold in a new voice, in a new season called V-League 2026-2027.

Context: four incidents, two rounds, one meeting

The two moments at Dong Nai did not happen in a vacuum. They followed a sequence of events that unfolded within the first few rounds of the season. In Round 2, CAHN centre-back Doan Van Hau lunged in and broke the leg of The Cong Viettel midfielder Doan Ngoc Tan. Also in Round 2, Nam Dinh's foreign signing Ezequiel Santos Da Silva stamped on the stomach of SHB Da Nang's Vo Huu Viet Hoang. Four incidents. Four different degrees of damage. One common denominator: the ball was somewhere else, or had long been somewhere else.

Facing the risk of on-pitch violence resurfacing and damaging the league's image, representatives of the organising committee, the Vietnam Professional Football Joint Stock Company (VPF) and the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF) met directly with the VFF Referees Board. The agenda revolved around a single demand, expressed in four words: apply the laws correctly. Protect the competition's discipline. Stop violent conduct on the pitch.

The phrase "apply the laws correctly" sounds simple, but it carries an implicit admission. To safeguard discipline, one must first admit that discipline has been loosened somewhere. And in football, loosened discipline usually starts with the smallest things: a missed card, a silent VAR, a decision taken too quickly and never reviewed again.

The core: what the law says about a kick with no ball

Under Law 12 of the Laws of the Game issued by FIFA, violent conduct is clearly defined: a player who uses excessive force or brutality against an opponent when the ball is not within playing distance must be sent off. Not cautioned. Not booked. Sent off, meaning a direct red card.

The key phrase is "when the ball is not within playing distance". A challenge while two players are chasing the same ball can be classified as careless, reckless or excessive depending on speed and point of contact. A kick into an opponent's leg after the ball has gone elsewhere leaves nothing to classify. There is no ball there, only a choice.

Based on my experience following matches, most off-the-ball kicks in Vietnamese football do not come from a sudden flash of anger. They are the product of calculation. A striker who consistently times his runs when the defensive line pushes up is a striker who needs to be "reminded" through physical pain. A centre-back facing that kind of striker often receives instructions from the bench: do not let him move freely, let him know where he is. The cheapest and least risky way to send that message, taught at many academies, is a kick from behind in a phase where the ball is out of anyone's control.

Every assist is a poem that never had time to be titled. Every off-the-ball kick is also a kind of assist; it simply assists in creating fear.

Where was VAR in that moment?

Under the operating protocol of the video assistant referee (VAR), the VAR team may intervene in four categories only: goals, penalty decisions, direct red cards, and cases of mistaken identity. An obvious off-the-ball kick falls squarely into the direct red card category. That means the VAR team had full authority to call the on-field referee to the monitor at any point while the match was still running.

In the Dong Nai versus CAHN match, the VAR team consisted of Mr Vo Hoai Thuong and Mr Nguyen Thanh Son. The on-field referee was Mr Le Vu Linh. In the incident where Tan Sinh kicked Dinh Bac, the on-field decision was a yellow card. The question left unanswered from outside the stadium is whether the VAR team advised an upgrade, and if so, whether the referee overruled it.

Former VFF vice-president for professional affairs and former head of the VFF Referees Board, Duong Vu Lam, told reporters after the match that referee Le Vu Linh had missed a card. He stressed that if Tan Sinh is to be retrospectively punished for this offence, referee Le Vu Linh should have his whistle suspended in the same manner. The responsibility of the VAR team must also be clarified. If the VAR team advised the referee and was overruled, the VAR team did its job. If the VAR team failed to advise referee Le Vu Linh that a red card was required for the off-the-ball kick, the VAR officials must also be disciplined.

This is a structured argument. It does not stop at identifying an individual error. It forces the system to answer a harder question: if four eyes on the pitch and two eyes in front of a screen all missed an act of violence, is the fault with the people or with the process?

In practice, disciplinary sanctions against referees in V-League are rarely announced publicly. But as Duong Vu Lam hinted, there is an indirect way to check: look at the referee appointments for the following rounds. A referee not appointed in the round immediately after the one just played is most likely serving an internal suspension. It is a form of half-transparency, where the public must infer from absence rather than read an announcement.

Early-season pressure and the physical cost

One detail that is easy to overlook in this sequence: everything happened in the opening phase of the season. The first two rounds of V-League are a period when the physical foundation of most teams has not yet stabilised. New signings are not yet familiar with the defensive system. Centre-backs are not yet used to the movement patterns of opposing strikers. The gap between the two lines is wider than usual, which increases the frequency of aerial and wide duels.

In that state, a quick striker like Dinh Bac becomes the most dangerous target on the pitch. Not because he scores many goals, but because he forces the defensive line to run back and face him. When a centre-back lacks the pace to keep up, the natural reflex is to stop him by any means. And when the referee appears lenient towards those stoppings in the first half, the message sent to both sides is very clear: today, here, the price of an off-the-ball kick is negligible.

The ball slows down when the 90+2nd minute knocks on the door. But at Dong Nai that day the question was not whether the ball was slow or fast. The question was that the ball had already left Dinh Bac's feet, so who was still touching his legs?

The blind spot: fixing whistles instead of habits

The meeting between VFF, VPF, the V-League organising committee and the VFF Referees Board sent a clear management message: the league does not want on-pitch violence to become its identifying image. But the approach carries a notable blind spot.

The focus of the meeting was "applying the laws correctly", and in this context it means not missing fouls, not missing cards. The entire pressure was placed on the person holding the whistle. This is an understandable reaction, but it inadvertently displaces the problem rather than solving it.

On-pitch violence is not born from a whistle. It is born from a player's decision, nourished by a culture in which taking an opponent out is considered "cleverness", "toughness", even a virtue of the seasoned professional. Under those conditions, intimidating referees only creates an unpleasant side effect: officials will blow up harder to protect themselves before the next meeting. And when cards fly for administrative rather than technical reasons, the continuity of the match breaks down, and players lose the ability to distinguish a normal duel from an offence.

The second blind spot concerns the retrospective punishment mechanism. Retrospective punishment is a good tool. It allows the disciplinary committee to handle conduct the referee missed, based on video evidence. But if it stops at suspending a player for a few matches while identical conduct multiplies the following round, the tool becomes a mid-season ritual. What has never been seriously questioned is club responsibility. When one club has three players committing violent-conduct offences in the same period, the issue is no longer the individual player. It is the bench.

A stumble is not an ending, only a line of verse that fell out of rhythm. But if the rhythm breaks four times in two rounds, the reader has to ask who is actually writing the poem.

Something nobody has said about the price of silence

There is another colour in this story that gets mentioned less often. It is the pressure on the victims themselves. Doan Ngoc Tan broke his leg from a challenge in Round 2. Vo Huu Viet Hoang was stamped on the stomach. Nguyen Dinh Bac, on one afternoon at Dong Nai, was elbowed and then kicked off the ball twice. After such incidents, what teams usually talk about is the recovery timeline. What is rarely discussed is the change in how a striker plays.

A player who has been taken out will think twice before pushing the ball past a centre-back with a reputation. He will choose the safer pass instead of the turn that could produce a goal. That is damage that appears in no statistical table, yet it exists, and it leaves marks on the quality of the league in ways we cannot measure in numbers.

An empty stadium, yet the city still breathes with every pass. In a country where every domestic match is an appointment for a great many people sitting in front of screens, the image of a player on the ground while the referee shows a yellow card sends a stronger signal than any Fair Play slogan.

Conclusion: a season that needs no further meetings

A writer, too, is chasing a ball, with words. And while chasing that ball, the writer hopes for one simple thing: by the end of the 2026-2027 V-League season, we will not have to remember September 20 as a dark landmark. The discipline of a league is not built in the minutes of a meeting. It is built in the decision of one referee in the mid-sixties of a match, amid the noise of the stands, when the ball has already gone the other way and nobody has time to turn their head.